Case Number 19720

IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA: SEASON FIVE

The Charge

A circle of jerks.

Opening Statement

In the beginning of the show's run, FX pitched It's Always Sunny In
Philadelphia as "Seinfeld on crack." While this
appropriately sums up the show's origins, it doesn't do justice to Season Five.
If Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were narcissistic, sociopathic,
nymphomaniacal alcoholics; then you'd be getting close to where the series
stands as of now. But is it funny?

Facts of the Case

The set contains the following episodes across three discs:

Disc One * "The Gang Exploits The Mortgage Crisis" While Dee (Kaitlin Olson, Leap Year) attempts to milk a surrogate
pregnancy for all its worth, Frank (Danny Devito, Batman Returns) buys a
house and attempts to vacate the former owners with the help of Charlie (Charlie
Day, Going The Distance), Mac (Rob McElhenney, Lost) and Dennis
(Glenn Howerton, The Strangers).

* "The Gang Hits the Road" Frank decides he wants to see the
Grand Canyon before his death, forcing The Gang to take Dee's new compact car,
replete with U-Haul, out of the city.

* "The Great Recession" After a major financial loss, Frank
declares a moratorium on cash handouts. To maximize their earning potential, Mac
and Dennis fire Charlie and Dee.

* "The Gang Gives Frank an Intervention" When a substance
abusing Frank drags The Gang to a funeral to hit on the bereaved widow, he
inspires them to plan an intervention. Meanwhile, Mac and Frank find themselves
competing for the widow's affections.

Disc Two * "The Waitress is Getting Married"
After Dee discovers a high school boyfriend is marrying Charlie's dream girl,
The Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis, A Quiet Little Marriage), Mac and
Dennis attempt to hide the information in order to keep Charlie from killing
them all.

* "World Series Defense" The Gang enters a court of law to
contest Dennis' thousand dollar parking ticket, blaming a traumatic experience
that occurred during Philly's World Series.

* "The Gang Wrestles for the Troops" Charlie, Mac, Dennis,
and Frank decide that the world is lacking a super-sized injection of '80s era
patriotism, so they start an amateur wrestling promotion "for the
troops." Dee meets her online Army boyfriend.

* "Paddy's Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens" Charlie
invents "Kitten Mittens" for a Philadelphia merchandising commission,
sparking the rest of the gang to pursue merchandising for Paddy's Pub.

* "Mac and Dennis Break Up" After Dee suggests Mac and
Dennis are too close, the pair find their bromance souring. Frank and Charlie
ignore them in favor of extracting a cat trapped in Dee's wall.

Disc Three * "D.E.N.N.I.S." Dennis presents his
fool-proof, sociopathic system of seducing the opposite sex, leading The Gang to
try and extrapolate on the results for themselves.

* "Mac and Dennis Write A Movie" When M. Night Shyamalan
returns to Philly to shoot a movie, Dee is hired as an actor. This sparks Mac,
Charlie, and Dennis to put together a script for Shyamalan, while Frank tries to
act as the group's agent.

* "The Gang Reignites The Rivalry" Flipadelphia, a drinking
contest between bars, is back on, causing The Gang to pursue a long-dead rivalry
with an upper-class bar. They pursue the aid of Dennis' former fraternity, only
to find a new rivalry waiting in the wings.

The Evidence

I'm a casual It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia fan. I own a handful of
seasons but rarely catch episodes when they premiere. Hardcore Sunny
fans, of which there are many, will have already pre-ordered Season Five, having
seen each episode five to fifty times, memorized each script, and knitted their
own versions of Charlie's kitten mittens.

Which leaves you, the reader, who, like me, is either an on-again-off-again
viewer or an audience unaffiliated with Paddy's Pub. If you're thinking about
taking the plunge with It's Always Sunny, be warned that you're likely to
either love it or hate it because of its completely unsympathetic characters. If
you don't see yourself laughing as characters try to solve their situational
problems with guns, poison, or sleep-raping; you should probably stick with
Friends. For everyone else, the show is a depraved delight facilitated by
an excellent cast of quirky characters whose chemistry and effortless
performances carry the show.

If It's Always Sunny is about anything, it is about relationships,
specifically partnerships. You'll notice "The Gang" is a term that is
commonly bantered around in episode summaries and for good reason -- Paddy's Pub
is the squalor cement that binds Frank, Dee, Dennis, Charlie, and Mac together.
While the characters are amusing enough on their own, the episodes that really
sing tend to place them in pairs, together as teams or at odds with each
other.

Howerton and McElhenny are consistently amusing as smug pseudo-studs Dennis
and Mac. Apart, Dennis is a smug douche bag, while Mac is a dimwitted Casanova.
Together, they are a pair of guys thoroughly in love with each other, letting
their flaws overlap and making for the show's most consistent "dream
team" pairing, never failing to let a homoerotic undercurrent between them
go unexploited. The pair's obsession with professional wrestling, womanizing,
'80s action movies (Predator and Dolph Lundgren are among the bigger
references), and maintaining their status as a "dynamic duo"
wonderfully spoofs modern contemporary comedy's overblown obsession with
bromances.

Mac and Dennis' ability to exploit their relationship as a means of gaining
Charlie and Dee's submission also makes them the most formidable schemers on the
show, an appropriate nod to fans as both Howerton and McElhenny are the show's
creators and head writers.

Being the only female character in the central cast, Kaitlin Olson somehow
manages to come off as the most masculine in the group, playing Dee rude and
crude with unflinching confidence. It's rare to see a female lead so willing to
shed her sex appeal in the name of character, elevating Dee from
"obligatory female character" to the most underrated on the show.

As the outsider of The Gang, Dee is often restricted to following her own
subplots that inevitably collide with that of the Gangs', even when they have
absolutely nothing to do with on another (a trope mocked to great effect in
"The Gang Exploits A Mortgage Crisis"). Dee's third-wheel distance
from her group is a trait she carries with both self-righteous pride and a sense
of loneliness that results in a string of failed seductions (and an army of cats
living in the walls of her apartment) that prove her just as selfish,
unsympathetic, and stupid as anyone else in Paddy's Pub. Dee's inability to
acknowledge this fact only makes her more appealing.

Despite the strengths of the rest of the cast, its Frank and Charlie who
tend to grab the most laughs. Frank is a character Devito has played for most of
his career -- a rude, boorish, self-indulgent beast of a man whose main goal in
life is having a good time before it all ends. This season gives us Frank
snorting pills, pointing guns, hiring busty hookers, puking, and trying to
"bang" anything in sight (including his ex-sister-in-law and her
weirdo daughter). Barring The Penguin in Batman Returns, Frank is Devito
at his most ghoulish extremes, a reformed husband and businessman determined to
live as pure and utter id to regain his lost youth. It's a consistently
surprising performance that has deservingly brought the seasoned actor back into
the mainstream fold.

Charlie creates an excellent counterbalance as Frank's sidekick, a manic,
socially retarded illiterate whose only real goal of not being left out (not
being Dee) is regularly subverted by Dee, Mac and Dennis. In this season,
Charlie Day continues to delicately walk his character's fine line, managing to
fall somewhere between extremely stupid and extremely creepy as the show's
regular whipping boy. For my money, Charlie remains the best part of the show.
He works well with any other characters or on his own, but at Frank's side the
duo are capable of carrying out the most illegal of acts to accomplish a common
goal, proving to be the show's most unpredictable (and funny) attribute.

The DVD comes packaged with 1:78:1 video that stays true to the show's indie
roots. While the show's continued choice of low-tech, handheld digital cameras
has been criticized by some, the grainy, often amateurish aesthetic perfectly
matches the world around Paddy's Pub, a place where the regulars are homeless
vagrants and advertisements are still shot with VHS camcorders. A decent, if
unspectacular, 2.0 stereo mix compliments the accompanying images well.

Extras wise, we're not given a whole lot of gold to work with here.
"The Gang's Dating Profiles" is a mildly amusing bit of improv,
fashioned as a faux Video Dating Profile for Mac (accompanied by Dennis), Dee,
The Waitress, and the slutty Artemis (Artemis Pebdani, Ugly Betty). It's
a fun way to kill five minutes, though a lack of Charlie Day and Danny Devito is
more than felt. "Kitten Mittens Endless Loop" is roughly five minutes
of cats walking around, adorned with kitten mittens, set to canned zany music.
"23,793 photos in 5 minutes: Schwep Dream Sequences in Montage" is the
closest thing we'll get to a behind the scenes featurette, a short, animated
photo montage tour of the set as the cast and crew work. An amusing batch of
deleted and extended scenes is included, as well as an unfunny blooper reel.

Finally, we're treated to six commentary tracks featuring the central cast
in random rotation as well as two guest appearances by Dr. Drew (New York
Minute). The tracks are inconsistent at best, the worst of them featuring
Danny Devito's dull-eyed, possibly intoxicated on-screen descriptions or Dr.
Drew's dull eyed, definitely sober on-screen descriptions. The best of them
sport the original gang (Olson, Day, McElhenny, and Howerton) riffing on various
aspects of production, but there's too much dead air to claim any of it as
particularly great.

Overall, this is a slapdash collection of extras that will only entertain
hardcore fans of the show. Everyone else needn't waste their time.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

It is important to note that when It's Always Sunny is blasting on all
cylinders, its artery blusteringly funny. Unfortunately, these episodes only
come along once every so often in Season Five. Thankfully, they're almost always
worth the wait, and spending time with The Gang is never anything less than
amusing.

This is the harshest criticism I can give It's Always Sunny. For a
show that tries to be a kind of anti-sitcom, it too often falls into the
trappings of the genre its skewing, relying on gimmicks ("The Gang Takes A Road
Trip") or punch lines we can see coming a mile away. It wouldn't be much of an
issue if the show wasn't trying to push the envelope with each successive
episode. Season Five too often feels like watching your favorite punk band
pandering to the Billboard Top 40, thus lessening the impact of the finest cuts
it has to offer.

As noted, the performances are almost uniformly excellent, but too often did
I find Charlie Day relying on high-pitched voice fluctuation to carry a joke.
The conversational tic that was endearing in the first couple of seasons has
become something of a crutch. I find Day to be the most consistently inventive
performer in the cast, but watching him use this technique in a marathon of
episodes started working my nerves around the end of disc one. Thankfully, he
tones it down toward the latter half of the season, making it a non-issue.

Also, what's with the weird cover art? Seriously, adult heads on baby bodies
with the tagline "A Circle of Jerks" beneath them? What the hell does
that even mean? Maybe I'm missing something here, but I find this bit of
photoshop tomfoolery to be utterly creepy. Send it back to hell.

Closing Statement

Depending on your taste, It's Always Sunny may or may not be your cup
of tea. It's crude, profane, and extremely mean-spirited. If you lack an
affinity for tasteless characters then you certainly won't find much humor to be
had here. However, if you're the kind of person who loves characters for their
flaws, rather than in spite of them, then you'll certainly have a lot to love
about It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: Season Five.